Times Online: Google is the number one topic of conversation

When Anne Spackman went home last year and told her teenage son she had a new job online, his response was: "You? You don't even know when to double click."

Spackman confesses that being moved to the role of editor of Times Online 15 months ago, it was like "being dropped into an immersion tank" and she's clearly still very loyal to print. Perhaps News International were hoping for closer integration of the Times website and its newspaper.

"I think we underestimate the power of our newspaper brands. They are powerful, tangible and still the places where we make most of our money."

She warned, though that integration of print and online mustn't hold back innovation, and predicted that smaller screens should be the focus for online news as the development of iPods and mobile speeds up. The pace of change is "spectacular, great fun and high risk", she said.

"Google has more impact than any other company. One tiny tweak to their algorithm and we all have to re-calibrate our pages. And we can't afford not to be brilliant on Google News.

"I think their move into DNA is very worrying - you start to wonder if things will feel like big brother soon.

"Google is the number on topic of conversation at News Corp."

Rupe, out there in the Wild West of the internet

Journalists now need commercial awareness

Online demands a least an awareness of skills that were never part of the journalistic parameters, she said. Knowing who the audience is and working out how to get the news to them used to handled by marketing and distribution, and that that's a new kind of commercial awareness that journalists have never had to have before.

"We are all operating to a certain extent without a business model, and in a world like that you do take risks but with a really strong awareness of what commercial back up there is."

Added to that, online gives publishers a real-time feed of information on exactly what readers are doing and that insight could feed back to the print paper too.

In growth, Spackman said that local news sites have an advantage over national properties because they have less competition. National sites end up competing with international sites; Spackman estimated that 1,500 sites offering "what might broadly be called news" compete with Times Online for the viewer's attention.

The news industry will become more male

Spackman also predicted that the industry will become more male than it is now, because online news demands a combination of editorial and technical skills that is, she said, more commonly seen in men.

"I've recruited a lot in the past 12 months," she said.

"What we need now is a level of journalistic creativity combined with real technical skills, and that's very different from journalists like me that started doing reports from the Women's Institute shows. We'll see less of those people driven to journalism through their curiosity about other people's lives, and it will be those people at the junction between editorial and technology that will have the exceptional value."

"The vast majority of those are men, so as a result there will be an industry more full of men than there are now. And I can't believe it's me that's saying that."

• More comment from Anne Spackman, on women in tech and on Google, over on PDA.